I don’t like the guy, but I like even less the government deciding to take candidates off the ballot.
The opinion: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-719_19m2.pdf
We conclude that States may disqualify persons holding or attempting to hold state office. But States have no power under the Constitution to enforce Section 3 with respect to federal offices, especially the Presidency.
To be fair, the government has always set criteria for being on the ballot. For example, to be US president you have to be at least 35, a natural citizen, and have live in the states for at least 14 years.
Not being an insurrectionist is also part of that criteria. We’ve just never had a presidential candidate that has needed us to consider that part of the constitution.
Time to violently storm the Supreme Court, then. After all, they approve.
This is a shit take. This ruling is not saying “Trump did nothing wrong”, this is specifically saying “States cannot unilaterally decide to remove federal election candidates from ballots”, which I completely agree with. As others have noted, it would open the doors to so much bullshit if this were allowed.
The SC could come out tomorrow and say “We’re disqualifying Trump”, this doesn’t preclude that.
States have always had that power. Whether its age, naturalization, or oath-breaking, it’s never been up to the federal government to decide disqualification.
Now they do not, as outlined by the supreme court this morning. You can disagree with the ruling all you want, but that doesn’t make the premise that “the SC has no problem with insurrectionist behavior!” any less stupid. It’s a fallacious premise.
it’s never been up to the federal government to decide disqualification.
It’s up to Congress to decide if someone is guilty of federal insurrection, not the states.
Edit: I see the downvotes, but I don’t see replies. I thought this was a place for reasoned debate, but it’s as bad as r/politics where anything regarding the orange man is concerned.
Arguably states unilaterally removing a candidate from the ballot is a major paving stone on the road to the civil war, when Lincoln won because of the split pro slave vote the south blew a gasket because it only just hit them then that everyone else had enough electors among them to ignore the south completely.
The idea that we have to let an insurrectionist campaign and win before disqualifying them is far worse. It would instantly lead to massive protests and violence from whichever party had that happen to them. If you want to avoid civil war then denial must happen early if at all.
States remove federal election candidates for eligibility reasons all the time. Trump is yet again getting special treatment.
[citation needed]
List one federal candidate a state successfully removed (that wasn’t convicted in a federal court, or died before the election.)
Edit: I see the downvotes, but I don’t see a name. I thought this was a place for reasoned debate, but it’s as bad as r/politics where anything regarding the orange man is concerned.
It’s not a State Law they’re using to remove him. It’s federal election laws. It’s in the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution which was adopted on July 9, 1868, as one of the Reconstruction Amendments. They even specifically discussed if a President should have an exception and decided it did not. The Supreme Court is choosing NOT to enforce the US Federal Constitution!
On the other hand, I could definitely see a bunch of red-controlled states deciding to remove Biden (or future Dem candidates) for whatever bullshit reason in the future, so while this ruling isn’t necessarily consistent with current practice it at least doesn’t open the door to that.
Except that R’s are already pretty cool with being inconsistent about what is our isn’t allowed, which is how we got certain members of the SC in the first place…
Sorry, but this is absolutely a victory for democracy and what little structure our government still has. If the states were to be allowed to remove candidates from the ballot, you could kiss any chance of Democrat candidates showing up on red state ballots goodbye.
States remove candidates routinely. It’s their constitutional right. Except with Trump for some reason.
Do you have any examples of that? I’m certainly no expert in this subject, so I’d love to know more.
Call me old fashioned, but an outgoing president who falsely claims their challenger stole the election and incites their supporters to storm the capitol building should be barred from holding office again, Democrat or Republican.
I absolutely agree. But it’s up to Congress to actually do that. That’s the branch of government that has failed here.
Except for the part where they punt to Congress as the sole arbiter of whether Trump engaged in insurrection. They absolutely know Congress won’t get off its collective ass to enforce, because it’s too broken to even pass a budget.
In this case, I don’t disagree with their decisions and neither did the moderate justices.
This prevents all of the heavily gerrymandered red States from pulling Biden from the ballot as well.
And if they ruled in favor of pulling Trump from the ballot, you can bet your ass that Biden will be gone from every red and swing state ballot too. Possibly more than we would be able to get Trump pulled from.
The thing is, there being no reason wouldn’t stop them from declaring that they have a reason. They’d abuse the hell out of it. No one is saying there is a justification for disqualifying Biden, just that a lot of GOP folks would do it anyway.
See when they decided they needed some sort of revenge impeachment and impeached without any particular reason.
I just got run out of hexbear because I believe voting for Biden, while shitty, is a form of harm reduction. I got called a genocide supporter and a fascist followed by hours of threats and wishes of harm, including my favorite. An emoji of a location where Nazis were executed by partisans in Yugoslavia.
I’m new to lemmy so just kinda assumed it was a leftist space. I didn’t realize that it’s just red tented Nazis with no actual love for their fellow human beings. Something I consider necessary to being a socialist in any form. That sucked.
I don’t really understand hexbear. They are leftists that are so left they are Nazis?
I get it, I don’t like voting for Biden, but we live in a two party system where we have to vote for the least evil one.
And despite myself, Biden has passed some of the most progressive legislation ever (at least my lefty podcasts tell me that) So while he was glacially, immorally, slow to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, he has done it and his policies are inarguably more moral than Trumps were and likely will be, should trump win.
Biden has passed some of the most progressive legislation ever
No, but he has passed some horribly racist bills back when he was involved in passing bills
They are leftists that are so left they are Nazis?
Tankies are not really leftists. They are conservatives who call themselves leftists. They are engaging in modern propaganda.
One of the standard tactics of fascists is to sew chaos and confusion among any who may resist. A tankie’s primary goal is to create confusion and demotivate progressives.
Not everyone falls for it, but some tankies can be pretty convincing that they really believe their nonsense. Do not be fooled. Tankies are absolutely lying. They are pro-level trolls with a deadly serious goal.
Maybe it’s kind of like how if you go far enough west you end up on the East.
Unfortunately, Lemmy.ml and a few other still-federated instances are currently infected with tankie mods. Some are a bit covert about it, banning people for clever little twists like “minimizing genocide” if the user calls any current military action a genocide.
Conservatism, including fake progressives like tankies, are a cancer that are long overdue for a cure.
I always see reports of this behavior from hexbear, but I’ve never been subjected to it, even when disagreeing with the user base there. Though,I am wondering if they just blocked me because I haven’t seen any of their posts in a while, now that I think about it.
I made a snarky comment on a post from a Hexbear Truth-Teller once. The OP replied to me after a few days and thought it was important that I knew they couldn’t see my post from the Hexbear server.
Uh sorry guy, not my concern really since it seems your server is the one blocking me.
“Block hexbear” is to browsing Lemmy as “use an ad blocker” is to browsing the internet.
This is their classic pincer maneuver employed by the establishment - and it works really well: the left wing candidate is both too left and not left enough.
You see it in every election.
It works so well because they own mainstream media so they can run all narratives at the same time as opinion pieces to hamstrung the left. That’s how the ratchet works also.
That’s why it bears repeating that if you don’t vote for Biden in the General Election, YOU ARE HELPING TRUMP. No “genocide Joe” arguments matter at that point no matter how much you twist your logic, no matter how you WISH things worked with the US general election. These are simple FACTS.
It also works because, simply put, those of us not on the Right have a tendency to disagree with one another on what to support. Now I’m not saying this doesn’t happen in general. Only that we’ll do it even to the point of detriment as we recognize situations and cases we feel need to be supported, instead of just what needs to be attacked, and those can vary widely.
My biggest and most consistent concern every election is whether we can come together in consensus long enough to make a difference. My second concern is whether we can hold that energy long enough to continue pushing for positive change.
I mean you are right, but hopefully we learnt our lesson when we got the current supreme court because Hillary was not pure like Sanders.
So long as we keep in mind that their goal is to split the working class in manageable little pieces we can put our differences aside to come together to at least stop the slide and hopefully take a few steps in the right direction.
It’s worth doing more than voting. If you’re able, sign up to volunteer and donate. Adopt a close congressional race too; fairly modest travel can get a lot of people to a swing district for the day.
Good. Democracy means that it can be democratically dissolved. If you’re holding on to a piece of paper written by slave owners to save your democracy, then you’ve missed the point of democracy.
If a majority of voters want racist, sexist fascism, that’s what you’ll get. No amount of social media posts will change that. Ask the slaves, Indigenous Peoples, women, poor men, non-Christians, and children of the United States for the majority of its history.
Vote. And get others to do it too. Change people’s minds–and, no, posting on social media isn’t changing anyone’s mind. You have to actually go out and do the work of talking to people, understanding them, and then changing minds. Yelling at people, digitally or actually, isn’t doing anything. Sorry.
Now all the people that want to sit in their room doing nothing and act like it is doing something can downvote.
It’s the only form of “democracy” you know: cheap and easy. “I NO LIKE.”
Well that would be great if we had a democracy. No Republican has won the popular vote for something like 20 years, but we’ve had more than one Republican president since then.
Voting is super important, but we also need a better democracy because we know the majority don’t want a bigot in office. But we’re still getting one every couple years
The United States is HUGE. Do you feel like population centers should get to dictate the terms to everyone that doesn’t live in a populous state? If so, then, again: vote. If you don’t like the current election process then change it.
You Americans complain so much about your electoral processes, but you do nothing to change them.
You get bigots and violent offenders in office either way you cut it. Obama normalized the massive, largely remote kill operations in non-battlefield engagements. He authorized the death of several thousand people exclusively through remote kill actions. As he noted himself, “turns out I’m really good at killing people. Didn’t know that was going to be my strong suit.”
The popular vote for an overpowered executive isn’t the answer. And I think you know that. The answer is harder and requires more work. But it’s nice to think it’s just about voting once every four years to fix it, isn’t it?
Good luck.
Yeah GW Bush won in 88 and since then there’s only been one GOP population vote win when W won in the middle of the war in 04. Only one republican win in the past 35 years, and this coming election will be no different. There’s no way in hell the popular vote goes against Biden in November.
Looks like we can’t agree with the (unanimous) SCOTUS decision without invoking the downvote brigade. But for all of those wishing for Trump to be kept off the ballot, consider what will happen in four years when Texas comes up with some bullshit reason to keep the democrat frontrunner off the ballot.
I understand and completely agree that Trump started an insurrection and deserves to be kicked off the ballot. But we all know Texas, Kansas, or whatever other godforsaken backward red state will not play by the rules next time.
It’s funny you think this ruling will stop fascist states from kicking non republicans off the ballots. Lets look at gerymandering. States submit illegal maps, play the waiting game, courts decide they’re illegal, states run illegal districts anyway because its too close to the election.
I’d rather do what right now instead of doing what’s wrong in hopes it doesn’t get weaponized. There isn’t a politician I care about enough that I’m willing let trump get away with insurrection in fear that red states might try to fuck with a dem nominee
If someone has done something that a state can even remotely argue inssurection, we should just dump that person and move on to the next. Maybe it’d force some new blood into the system
So tired of letting Republicans get away with shit out of fear of them abusing. They are already abusing everything and at some point we might need step up and stand on buisness
This assumes the Republicans will respect precedent and play by the rules. But when do they ever do that? Are they going to start playing fair as soon as their chosen dictator is installed? You don’t beat fascists this way. You have to keep them from seizing power in the first place.
